Legends of a Fall: Introduction to the Museum Studies Edition. PG: Anakin, Obi-Wan, Padmé, others
Disclaimer: George Lucas owns Star Wars. This story is purely a work of fan fiction, and I am not making any profit from it.
Author's note: Written as a congratulatory gift!fic for attanagra, who totally deserved it!!!!! [/wild cheering] This particular (re)introduction won't appear in the "framing" effort; but since it is fairly common for chapters of academic books to be published in anthologies with new introductions or commentaries, it seemed reasonable to draft a specialized introduction for the Lives on Hand anthology edition. This piece, therefore, would obviously be written well after the "Legends of a Fall" work itself; selections from Legends are included in the anthology precisely because it has become a "must-read" in the field. My anonymous academic needs a name - help, guys! :) attanagra, I hope you like it - but you can still have he!au if you'd prefer!
Enjoy!
Legends of a Fall: Introduction to the Lives on Hand: A Museum Studies Anthology Edition
with special thanks to New Freedom University
Textual evidence of Orun’s life is scanty, and the conspicuous absences tell their own tale. This should not be surprising, as her most famous years were spent under the authority of the Jedi, before the Purges; she served as an officer in the Grand Army of the Republic during the Clone Wars. The Empire was surprisingly effective, within a relatively short period of time - hardly more than twenty standard years of Galactic dominion - in silencing, if not actually erasing, popular memories of the Clone Wars heroes. Further complicating the problem, Orun herself seems to have been, if not actually illiterate, at least wary of writing - betraying a typically Lorethan feeling that any story worth telling demands to be told in person, between participants who share a particular convergence in space/time and therefore mutually experience the act of storytelling as a shared event. Recording such narratives obviously misses the point; it is not to be done.
Apart from her military record, whose unexplained gaps suggest either considerable censorship or a very spotty career at odds with her reputation, there is little to show that she ever existed. This, again, may be owing to the Imperial attempts at re-writing history that very nearly succeeded in erasing it, as before the rise of the New Republic the same can be said of Anakin Skywalker (and indeed of anyone closely associated with the Old Jedi Order); almost all the documents relating to his life are narratives reconstructed ex post facto. The earliest and most reliable of these seem to have been compiled by his son, Luke, with the assistance of Orun herself, and it is these accounts that bear the strongest (implicit) testimony to Orun’s personal importance - not to the galaxy at large, but to the Skywalker family, as a family.
Of Orun’s own writing, we have very little; for a woman who, by all other accounts, led an active life, she seems to have had very little to say for herself. Leia Organa quotes her as saying (apparently in explanation), “I never became comfortable in the language of my captors.” But since Orun certainly conducted most of her life in Basic - she left Loreth at twelve and never returned for more than three months at a stretch until at least the period of the Yuuzhan Vong invasions - this utterance makes little sense unless it is taken to mean specifically written language, the language of the Republic, the Empire, and quite literally of her enslavement.
Of the painfully few documents that have endured to give us Orun “in her own words,” none is in her native Lorethan, and over ninety percent are military reports, written for the use of other beings. Many of them are directed to (eventually) Grand Admiral Thrawn, with a few intended for Lord Vader. A fragmentary history of Orun’s life, in her own words, may be constructed from the reports she posted over the years to various beings. But these are unsatisfactory in that they are hardly ever personal; Orun says almost nothing about herself, or on her own account - though one does get a fair sense of her priorities.
By contrast to Orun’s speaking silences, Obi-Wan Kenobi has left a capacious body of words - and yet, if we lacked Luke Skywalker’s testimony to the integrity of his collection, it would hardly be possible to recognize his musings on philosophy and his forays into narrative as having the same author. The former are dry, pedantic, occasionally relieved by flashes of gentle humor; the latter are intense, lyrical, almost like poetry in their concentration of meaning. He admired Orun very much, and his nostalgia for their lost friendship - and the bond of shared love for another being - runs through and between his words; but his longing for Anakin is both constantly sharp, present, acute, and an ever-deepening well of sorrow. He is likely the original source for those versions of the Skywalker legend which include the Fight on Mustafar; it is doubtful whether any of the other players had timely access to knowledge of the fight in such graphic detail.
Anakin Skywalker left almost no trace of himself in writing. In his reincarnation as the Sith Lord Darth Vader, he wrote very much as did Orun: in the guise of progress reports, requisition orders, personnel evaluations. One of these evaluations is of “Personal Assistant Llewellyn Vjun,” which several commentators have speculated to be a pseudonym for Orun; the evaluation describes her performance as “satisfactory” and recommends for her a bonus - of one million credits. Curiously, the line for her monthly salary is left blank; so either Lord Vader was taking the entire procedure less-than-seriously (a mere formality), or Orun had no regular source of income from her employment in his service.
Scholars have predictably been too preoccupied with speculating on just what tasks she might have performed “satisfactorily” to merit a million-credit bonus to concern themselves with the question of her economic status. But in fact it is of great significance; if the line was left blank because whoever was processing the form could be assumed to be already familiar with the particulars of Orun’s situation, that sends one message; if, on the other hand, it is left blank because Orun had no regular paid employment, then the obvious conclusion is that she was entirely dependent on Vader’s continuing largess, which means something quite different.
The best material evidence for the experiences of the saga’s central figures as “lived reality” comes not from the written record, nor even from the New Temple holocrons, but from Restoration University’s Skywalker Museum of Galactic History. The museum itself was built on ground endowed for the purpose - on Bellassa, not coincidentally - by Darra Antilles, a lateral descendant of Roan Lands, whose part in the saga is minor, but controversial: he is twice described as Ferus Olin’s “partner,” but the meaning of this designation is not clear; and in Luke Skywalker’s account (but not in most of the oral narratives I have encountered), Olin is romantically linked with Ryn Orun during at least part of the Imperial era. If the connection is granted - and there seems little reason to doubt it, apart from an aesthetic preference for the narrative elegance of an Orun who pines eternally for one man, Anakin Skywalker - then it raises important questions about the Olin-Lands relationship and how significant Orun’s involvement with the Lands family may have been (or not) after his death; there are no allusions to correspondence between them outside of Skywalker’s materials.
The Skywalker Museum, opened in 200 ABY to great fanfare, quickly received an expansion - the Orun Annex, which was built at the request (and with the money) of Han Solo-Janren (great-great-grandson of the famous General Han Solo who participated in the Rebel Alliance and went on to marry Leia Organa) less than thirty years later. The Orun Annex is notable not just for its name, or its impressive pedigree, but for the fact that it houses the most extensive collection of “heretical” artifacts anywhere in the Republic. This preoccupation undoubtedly reflects the fact that Skywalker’s holocrons frequently refer to Orun’s construction of herself as a “heretic” under the Old Jedi Code.
There is no evidence that Luke Skywalker cared one way or the other about Orun’s heretical tendencies; wild folktales aside, he was by all accounts a singularly unmanaging sort of Grandmaster, and rarely took a stand on matters of doctrine, preferring instead to let “his” followers follow their instincts. “They taught my father dogma,” he is reported to have said, “and look how that turned out.” In fact, no one in the family seems to have given much consideration to Orun’s anti-Jedi heresies, or indeed her unhappy history with the Jedi in general, until Jacen Solo decided to write his dissertation on non-Jedi philosophy, and realized that he had a ready-made informant in his grandfather’s perpetual ally. Whether he interviewed her personally is not clear - the existing accounts are fragmented, due largely to Solo’s own personal history - but it is certain that he began the collection which his sister Jaina’s great-grandson later bequeathed to Restoration University via the Orun Annex. The great treasure of that annex, consequently, is a poignant narrative of the Skywalker Saga told strikingly from Orun’s perspective, reportedly written down by a young Darth Caedus (or, depending on whom you ask, a justly angry Jacen Solo whose reputation was severely damaged by malicious rumors that he had turned to the Dark Side). The text is notable not just for the narrative complexities that make it clearly a creative work of tribute rather than historicity, presenting the most humane of the early renderings of Orun’s “side” of the story, but for its explanation of the so-called Altisian heresies, with which both Ryn Orun and Anakin Skywalker evidently had some currency; whether mutually or independently is left unclear.
The Skywalker Museum, though it accepts artifacts and occasionally presents exhibits related to any area of Galactic History, has for obvious reasons a special interest in the “Long” Imperial Era - the period extending from, roughly, the Trade Federation Blockade of Naboo (some scholars would push it forward ten years to the first battle of the Clone Wars) to the treaty with the Thrawn Empire, leading into the Yuuzhan Vong invasions. Included among the museum’s various collections are the following items of key importance to our story:
- Obi-Wan Kenobi’s lightsaber (retrieved from a vault on Imperial Center/Coruscant following its conquest by the infant New Republic)
- Anakin Skywalker’s Padawan braid, meticulously preserved
- Several holoimages of Anakin Skywalker bequeathed to the museum by Evinne Ardel
- A variety of personal items belonging to participants in the saga, largely important because in some cases their existence underscores the veracity of particular episodes in the saga
The Skywalker Museum is currently maintained under the auspices of Chief Curator Rhiel Arganadron; the Orun Annex is managed separately but in congruence by Managing Curator Antil Zharaya Leh. Both of these beings contribute immeasurably to the value of their collections. There is a sense of personal reality one gets from holding Obi-Wan Kenobi’s lightsaber, or feeling the silk of Padmé Amidala’s dressing-gown, that one cannot get from reading their history, no matter how well-articulated. But the best feature of the Skywalker Museum and its annex may be the readiness of the resident curators to tell stories to the curious - vividly, meaningfully, and with the deep sense of rootedness that comes from handling the daily objects of the lives of heroes.